Economics

The display was disgusting but entirely predictable if you understand something about how our own hunger games are played. In this decade and a half of easy money, a whole class of people has risen to the top of the cultural echelon not by productive labor but by educational credentials and being part of the corporate float. They have come to believe that the system makes sense simply because it has benefited them. This is why they so gladly took to pandemic controls when they were at their height.

A growing lack of freedom in Asia’s foremost country is the surest signal we need that China’s lust for greatness is more rhetorical and performative than real. In other words, the only way to be beaten by China is to mimic its authoritarian ways. Please keep this in mind with what indefensibly happened stateside in 2020.

Every indication is that CBDC’s arrival is imminent. Yesterday, several global banks announced a partnership with the NY Federal Reserve to pilot digital dollars. Given the ubiquity of credit/debit cards, payment apps, and other online payment systems, digital money has been bound to happen for some time. The risk isn’t the electronic part, that’s inevitable – it’s the fact that a central bank will oversee the digital currency.

What is happening is people are taking multiple jobs in order to stay abreast of the soaring cost-of-living, and also because work-from-home has made it very easy for free lancers and gig workers—especially in the tech sector—to attach themselves to two, three or even four employer payrolls. These all count as “jobs” in the establishment survey, but not in the household survey.

The Hang Seng correction is a reminder to politicians and pundits the world over that markets are much more powerful than politicians, and they’ll speak their mind in ways that shame those so foolish and so arrogant as to believe that prosperity can be planned. It’s a warning to Xi Jingping, but also a warning to conservatives who should know better, but who presently think that the answer to state planning is more state planning.

Economics is about people in their choices and institutions that enable them to thrive. Public health is about the same thing. Driving a wedge between the two surely ranks among the most catastrophic public-policy decisions of our lifetimes. Health and economics both require the nonnegotiable called freedom. May we never again experiment with its near abolition in the name of disease mitigation. 

Washington compensated one and all for the resulting harm and then some by unleashing a $6 trillion spending bacchanalia in less than 14 months, which was accomplished with barely a dissent from either party to the Washington duopoly because interest rates on government debt had plunged to an all-time low. In turn, that was enabled by the most reckless spurt of money printing and debt monetization in recorded history.